It is the purity of childhood that makes it possible. The thrill that children—you children—experience on first witnessing a rainbow is pure joy and wonder, simple, instinctual. In much the same way a bird sings to greet the sun each morning. We have to hold on to this purity of nature if we are to continue experiencing such joy, such wonder, in our lives.

So Wordsworth says, and I agree with him. But the poem enacts a larger, more complex truth as well. Wordsworth’s heart may leap up, for sure—but is the joy he feels now the same joy he felt the first time he saw the rainbow? Isn’t his current experience of the rainbow already different from his experience as a child, including as it does the memory of other times in his past when he has witnessed one, the hope that he will continue to experience a similar thrill in the future, the fear that he may not?

Wordsworth the man can only wish he is able to maintain that same simplicity and purity he possessed as a child. The very act of writing this poem proves to him—and us—that his wish cannot come true.

Wordsworth is a prophet. Like all prophets, he describes what should be, while at the same time admitting to what is, what cannot be, and what is beyond his understanding. Like all prophets, he has been blessed not with the whole truth but with that part of the truth he can grasp and convey. Like all prophets he is beset with self-doubt.

But even speaking half-truths, he points us toward the whole. The light he casts flickers, illuminating some part of the picture of life for one moment, only to cast it into shadows and doubt the next. But that flickering gives us a glimpse of the truths that mark our lives.

This is the best any human being can do in the face of the complexity of the universe, and most of us will do much worse.

6

So this is what it is, that feeling, almost akin to helplessness: my being so happy in my foremothers’ happinesses that my heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense. As though of hemlock I had drunk, or drained some opiate one minute past, and toward unconsciousness had sunk . . .

Keats again to the rescue, his ode to the diminutive nightingale that transfixed him one night—as if my could-be mother’s influence is growing in me, my future already decided.

Or am I merely dizzy, running out of the oxygen that has so far maintained my link to my mother? Am I to be forced to take a breath soon, to breathe in this world before I’m ready to enter it, before I’ve had my fill of this moment, my mothers together in momentary happiness?

As if Time is ready to forsake me too. I must press on, if I am to learn the full truth of my journey.